1942

Lieutenant Goto fully agreed that punishment had to be given out for the deaths of Major Shimura and his guard. The second guard might yet die from his wounds, and his fate, whether he died or not, was part of the planned retribution.

What did surprise Goto was that Admiral Iwabachi had overruled Colonel Omori regarding its severity. Iwabachi wanted blood for the harming of his men and he wanted it in copious amounts, while Omori urged relative restraint. Deaths had to occur, but Omori wanted far fewer than Iwabachi did, and he wanted the native Hawaiian population insulated from the reprisal. It struck Goto as ironic that the admiral was endorsing acts not dissimilar to those that had seen him banished to Hilo.

The new commander of the Hilo garrison was Captain Isamu Kashii, and he held the post by virtue of being more senior in rank than the other captains. In his mid-thirties, Kashii was a firebrand and a fanatic, totally the opposite of the late, unlamented, and cowardly Major Shimura. Kashii wanted to kill Americans, and Goto wanted to help him.

A hundred men and women were chosen from the population. People of Japanese extraction were. excluded from the reprisal, but, regardless of his orders, Hawaiians were not. When Goto had commented that the Hawaiians were likely to be sympathetic to Japan, Kashii had told him it didn’t matter. They were all suspect in his eyes. Kashii could not even begin to comprehend the thought of the assassin being a lone warrior. He was vehement that the murderer had to have had help.

This was more like it, Goto had exulted. Shimura had been a pussy, afraid of his own shadow and more interested in entertaining himself with booze and drugs than in searching out the Americans. Let the blood flow.

As a result, the hundred doomed men and women had been chosen, some at random and some because they hadn’t shown enthusiasm for the Japanese cause, then interrogated with utmost brutality by Goto and some of Kashii’s men. Many couldn’t walk and had to be helped into the sunlight by those who could, while several were blind. Their eyes had been gouged out. The remainder of the Hilo population had been ordered to witness the punishment, and there was an audible moan by the assembled thousands as the tormented victims were led to the place of death.

Ten thick wooden stakes had been driven into the ground. They rose more than six feet tall and stood in front of a higher wall of sandbags. A Model 92 heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod stood about fifty yards away, while the two-man crew looked grimly at the empty stakes.

Moaning and numb with terror, the first ten were tied to the stakes. Captain Kashii signaled, and the machine gun commenced an insanely loud chattering that drowned out all other sounds. The victims jumped and writhed as the bullets tore into them, sending a spray of blood and flesh into the air. Then everything was still, and the bodies lay limp in their ropes. After a few seconds, some people in the crowd started screaming, but they were ignored. Soldiers untied the victims and dragged their bodies to the wall behind. A couple of them twitched and may still have been alive.

A second ten were brought forward, tied, and machine-gunned. The process was continued until only the last ten remained, and they too were tied to the now badly splintered stakes. The ground before them was so soaked with the blood of the preceding victims that red puddles had formed, and the crowd had ceased screaming or crying out. The mound of dead and dying behind the stakes had become a stack of bloody, raw meat as bullets that missed their targets had smacked into the bodies.

With the last ten in place, Kashii gave another signal, and ten soldiers with bayonets on their rifles took their places, one in front of each victim. Kashii bellowed an order, and the soldiers began their practice. First, they lunged their blades into the meat of their victims’ inner thighs, then the muscle of the upper arms. The last ten shrieked for mercy, but there was none. More thrusts slashed at their buttocks, the backs of their calves, the cheeks of their faces, their eyes, and, finally, slashing, disemboweling thrusts to the victims’ stomachs finished it.

Even so, it would take a while for some of them to die. The crowd was dismissed, but soldiers stood guard over the bloody place. Kashii ordered that no bodies be removed for at least twenty-four hours as an example.

The captain strode over to Goto and smiled. There was blood spattered on Kashii’s uniform. “Well, that ought to keep them in line. If it doesn’t, we’ll do it again and again until it does.”

The man loves to kill, Goto thought, and then laughed harshly to himself. And Omori thought I was a problem. At last, he congratulated himself, I am serving under a real leader.